Enterprise networks are carrying a very fast growing volume of both business and non-business critical traffics. Often, business applications such as video collaboration, cloud applications, etc., use the same hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP) and/or HTTP secure (HTTPS) techniques that are used by non-business critical web traffic. This complicates the task of optimizing network performance for specific applications, as many applications use the same protocols, thus making it difficult to distinguish and select traffic flows for optimization.
As the number of business and non-business critical applications increases, so too are the number and variety of service level agreements (SLAs) that may be in use by a network. In general, an SLA refers to a target or threshold level of performance guaranteed by the network, and may be associated with a particular type of traffic. For example, many real-time business applications are very bandwidth demanding and having corresponding SLAs that are used to ensure that a certain amount of network bandwidth is available for a particular flow of traffic.
In some cases, selection of a communication path for a traffic flow in an enterprise network may be performed dynamically based on threshold crossing alerts (TCAs) sent within the network. In general, a TCA may be generated whenever a network characteristic crosses a predefined threshold (e.g., a threshold value set by a network administrator). For example, a TCA may be generated whenever the delay or jitter along a path exceeds a threshold amount. Traffic switches between available paths may then take place, in response to receiving a TCA originated by the destination side of the path.